Boureau, Théologie, Science et Censure au XIIIe siècle.

Alain Boureau, director of studies at the EHESS is a medievalist. Among his many works are La Papesse Jeanne (1988), Le Droit de cuissage. Histoire de la fabrication d'un mythe (1995). 

This book could have been entitled The Archbishop and the Corpses. In fact, there is a corpse bleeding in front of a murderer, bad blows, fury, and disastrous destinies. But everything here is about doctrine: violence affects discourse, and the central event is the condemnation, in 1286, of academic theses held at Oxford University, essentially on the nature of the dead body of Christ. The author of this condemnation, the Franciscan archbishop John Peckham, had been at the centre of a miraculous and public denunciation of what some considered to be his criminal injustice three years prior to the condemnation: the bones of the bishop Thomas of Cantiloupe, who had died in exile, had bled out on their way through the persecutor's province. Thanks to a careful analysis of the text of the censure and its various contexts, the author launches new propositions on medieval academic practices, on the fortune and misfortune of Thomism, on the dynamics of scholastic concepts and disciplines, on the articulations between common mentalities and scholarly culture, between spirituality and knowledge as well as on the emergence of scientific formalization.